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ART IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET, 1989 TO TODAYFEB 7 – MAY 20, 2018BRIDGITT AND BRUCE EVANS FAMILY AND WEST GALLERIES

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today examines how the internet has radically changed the field of art, especially in its production, distribution, and reception. The exhibition comprises a broad range of works across a variety of mediums—including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects—that all investigate the extensive effects of the internet on artistic practice and contemporary culture. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; possibilities for new subjectivities, communities, and virtual worlds; and new economies of visibility initiated by social media.

Art in the Age of the Internet features work of an international, intergenerational group of artists, including Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Harun Farocki, Josh Kline, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Thomas Ruff, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

Paris

In his videos embedded in sculptural environments, as well as in his first feature film, Occidental (2017), Neïl Beloufa has made a strategy of sidestepping expectations to redirect attention to structural questions of politics and power. Here, Beloufa ups the ante of his culture jamming to expose the discourses and strategies of modern propaganda across the board, from Far Left to Far Right. The clincher is that the exhibits—including artifacts such as a baseball signed by Tony Blair, loans from museums of military history, and artworks by the likes of Gustave Courbet and Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as by Beloufa himself—are installed on robotically controlled display units. The automated rearrangement of these displays continuously makes and unmakes the connections between them, forcing a literal and metaphorical repositioning of the viewer in relation to the panoply of competing ideological agendas that define our time, and the art made within it.

American Landscape 1989 is included in the exhibition 20/20 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. It's a joint exhibition from the CMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem and is curated by Amanda Hunt and Eric Crosby. 20 artists from the collection of each institution is included.

Century Pictures is pleased to announce our grand opening at 1329 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick, on June 3, 2017. Situated beside Koenig & Clinton gallery, this new public exhibition space will highlight Leo Koenig's continued interest in tracing the historical within the contemporary.

The idea for Century Pictures was formed in response to a manic, predominately digitized glance that has overtaken the art-viewing experience. Presenting works or objects that often will span generations, the gallery aims to offer an alternative to the frenetic eye. While considering the historical as mooring to the dynamic movements of our future, we acknowledge a common thread; that many referents were conceived in radical experimentation.

Surveying our cultural past suggests that artistic experimentation is seldom fostered in exclusive neighborhoods, but is rather nurtured where artists themselves live, work, and exchange ideas. Curated, museum quality shows are an undeniable gift of the large galleries that will continue to inhabit Manhattan. Century Pictures proposes an alternative juncture--a space that compels visual and intellectual query between generational, compositional, or tangential precedents. This sets the stage for an open-ended exploration that is not confined to market-based definitions. Working collaboratively with renowned artists and designers, who are not represented by the gallery, our goal is to actively explore and test boundaries. The interest lies in starting a conversation, rather than having the final word.

Joining the energetic and diverse neighborhood of Bushwick, we welcome being part of an organic exchange, gleaning insight from our visitors, while offering a space to revel in the creative impulse as a persistent force.

Century Pictures will open with works by Jon Kessler. On view will be a work first shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1985, in addition to a recently completed work, underscoring the artist's participation in this years Biennial. Century Pictures will be open to the public Wednesday-Sunday, 11am-6pm.

EVOLUTIONJon KesslerThe WhitneyMarch 17 - June 11, 2017New York City, New York

The formation of self and the individual’s place in a turbulent society are among the key themes reflected in the work of the artists selected for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition includes sixty-three participants, ranging from emerging to well-established individuals and collectives working in painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film and video, photography, activism, performance, music, and video game design.

The Whitney Biennial is the longest running survey of contemporary art in the United States, with a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking lively debate. The 2017 Biennial is the Museum’s seventy-eighth in a continuous series of Annual and Biennial exhibitions initiated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932. It is the first to be held in the Whitney’s downtown home at 99 Gansevoort Street, and the largest ever in terms of gallery space.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial is co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks.

The World is Cuckoo (Clock)Manifesta 11June 11th - September 18thZurich, Switzerland

Les AmbassadeursThis complex kinetic sculpture, on show in Les Ambassadeurs shop, appears to be driven by the tiny tourbillon mechanism from inside a watch, specially designed by Adriano Toninelli. This miniature movement is transferred through cylindrical zoetropes up to a moving neon sign that reads, ‘the world is cuckoo clock’. In fact the sculpture is powered by other means – making the hoax a metaphor for ‘cuckoo’ manipulations of power. Taxidermy birds, unblinking and immobile, adorn this representation of the crazed mechanisation of modern life, in which drones, not birds, circle overhead. Jon Kessler’s visual diary of the process is on view in the Helmhaus. This project has been generously supported by Officine Panerai, Corporate Supporter of Manifesta 11.

Jon Kessler presents an exhibition of small kinetic sculptures entitled Jon Kessler’s Gifts. The show includes sculptures that Kessler has made as gifts to close friends and family, commemorating birthdays and weddings over the years. Borrowed-back gifts are shown alongside new gifts that offer lyrical objects playing with ideas of balance, mechanics, customization, and personalization. Kessler is known for massive installations that comprise hundreds of screens and cameras, walls of TVs, interactive feedback and often an immersive assault on the senses. Jon Kessler’s Gifts, in contrast,is an exhibition of personal and idiosyncratic arrangements on an intimate scale.

Many of the sculptures use objects of other cultures (a Chinese soup spoon, a Buddha figurine) like the ‘80s and ‘90s works of Jon Kessler’s Asia that sampled chinoiserie paired with lights and motors in various states of connectivity. Jon Kessler’s Gifts also incorporate found tchotchkes (a glass egg with glitter inside, a small bird skeleton), tools and construction elements (a wrench, a vise, an I-beam) married to handmade pieces (like plaster-cast fingers and a chicken’s foot cast in aluminum). In the work A Horse and 2 Fishermen Walk into a Bar, a horse figurine is paired with two differently sized fisherman – all found kitsch objects from New York City’s Chinatown. All different sizes, they hang from a metal framework connecting them to other objects with clever juxtapositions that are counterbalanced by a weight. The delicately-balanced system moves and shifts slightly, as if to mark the small variations in the personal relationship to objects. Kessler re-works the materials of jewelry-making, in this case molded silver, with sly reference to fine jewelry as the conventional store-bought gift. Other sculptures, like Twist My Arm, incorporate purchased brass chains strung through an abstract cloud of pounded brass.

Many of the objects in Jon Kessler’s Gifts incorporate humorous and interactive elements. An introduction to a joke in one piece, the fishermen’s lines each hold the next object, a take on the Russian nesting dolls. In Titty Twister, a Moog synthesizer is the base for a headless femaletorso, and the plaster body’s silver nipples are the control knobs on the embedded instrument. This work combines analogue mechanisms with an electronic system, hitting upon the divide of handmade versus digital that Kessler explores and connects. The sculptures are succinct systems with whimsy and synergy, though their independent parts are not fastened. Representative of his practice at large, Kessler’s personal, poetic and mechanical DIY networks are built from balance, proportion, stability, weight, and counterweight.

This is Jon Kessler’s second solo exhibition at Salon 94. Kessler’s most recent large-scale kinetic multimedia installation The Web was exhibited at the Swiss Institute, New York in 2013 and traveled to Museum Tinguely, Basel last year. Kessler’s first solo exhibition at Salon 94 was The Blue Period in 2012. The artist's work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee Art Museum, among many others. Jon Kessler plays guitar in the art band the X-Patsys that will perform in the Palazzo Grassi as part of the Venice Biennale 2015.

Salon 94 Freemans is located at 1 Freeman Alley off of Rivington Street. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 11 am – 6 pm. For more information please call the gallery at (212) 979 0001 or emailinfo@salon94.com